In a photoresist process which is one of the semiconductor manufacturing processes, a resist pattern is formed by exposing a resist film obtained by coating resist on a surface of a semiconductor wafer (hereinafter, referred to as a wafer) which is a substrate in a predetermined pattern and then developing the resist film. The processing is performed using a system in which an exposure apparatus is connected to a coating and developing apparatus which coats and develops resist.
The coating and developing apparatus is equipped with plural kinds of processing modules which performs different processings and a plurality of sheets of wafers received in a carrier is sequentially conveyed to each of the processing modules in a predetermined order, and thus accurate processing is performed. Further, to increase the number of sheets which may be processed per unit time, these processing modules are prepared in plural within the coating and developing apparatus.
Meanwhile, in the coating and developing apparatus, there is a case where a conveying schedule representing a relationship between the processing modules to which each wafer is conveyed and a conveying timing is prepared in advance and the conveyance of the wafers is performed based on the conveying schedule (see, e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-311511: Paragraph 0053, FIG. 7). Even though the plurality of wafers is processed in parallel by the coating and developing apparatus in which the plural kinds of processing modules is equipped, the plurality of wafers may be effectively and stably realized by using the conveying schedule.